Having It All, An OverSharing Story (plus this week’s OPEN TO ALL LEVELS salon details)

(If you just want salon details, scroll to the bottom. This is definitely TLDR)

Next week I’m going to Adelaide. I have sold 35 out of 400 tickets so far. Which is either due to people’s current unwillingness to commit themselves to things in advance lest the norm suddenly go flop again, OR due to the fact that I haven’t been gigging/plugging as much as might be necessary to sell more tickets, OR due to the fact that Adelaide. (End of sentence). OR my career in live stand up comedy is over, and this is the beginning of finding out. ANYWAY.

Of course, I’ve been busy with other things than self promotion, which was never my best skill. I’m trying to find this equilibrium of work passion, and creating slash sustaining human life! Okay?! Geeze!!

We can’t all be Doctor Frankenstein, lucky fellow, combining the two. There’s a parent that has it all; job satisfaction AND a monstrous corpse son.

The idea of having it all, let’s unpack.

• First, obviously not literally, because who wants a decomposing giant squid and the Andromeda galaxy and an onion soup all at the same time?
• Second, wait what? What is it? Is this the it that you can make in New York and subsequently anywhere? That, ‘it’?
• Third, obviously what they’re talking about is the having it all of (mainly) women having jobs while they’re also being mothers; the job that is very hard, too important to be dirtied with base financial remuneration, treated with a wishy washy awe bordering on a smudgy religiousness, and importantly, also considered basically animalistic, lacking intellectual rigour and cultivating no transferable skills that you can put on your CV. (I’m suspicious of this claim, because I’m sure I can figure out some alternate use for my sudden ability to spray milk across the room. Maybe they can hire me to inspire cows)

SPEAKING OF WHICH! I HAVE A STORY!

I mentioned, in the other week’s salon, an incident that occurred when I was last a guest panellist on the BBC’s News Quiz. This was a ‘live zoom recording’ with an audience across the U.K. of about 1000 people. Now they’re back in the theatre, I imagine I’ll have to wait until I’m back in London to be back on the panel, but in this instance, I was in my little podcasting studio (an ex-laundry-room in my flat, just large enough for a compact standing desk and all my audio equipment).

Now, the tech call was for about 5am Australia time (very civilised, compared with the winter time differential, which has you up at about 3 in the morning) and then the live recording of the show (with zoom audience) is meant to run from about 6 til 7.30, and they edit the show out of that.

Before I go on, one other piece of (relevant) information is that ‘Laser’ Fraser wakes up at about 7.30/8 (a very sane baby), and I feed her then. I had prepared a bottle of my milk for her to be given in case she woke up before I got out of the recording, or in case Andy Zaltzman ran over time.

All being in order in the universe, Andy Zaltzman ran over time.

I was relaxed about it! I had made preparations! I had anticipated everything!

Except, if you don’t know, (I didn’t!) a breast milk fact (relevant! I promise!) is that your bosoms and your baby have a subtle and complex relationship which leaves your opinion on things completely to one side. So at about approximately the exact time that my baby was waking up in the other room and being given a bottle, my milk ducts revved into action.*

I imagine you can imagine that ‘All milked up with nowhere to go’ rapidly becomes an uncomfortable feeling. Very… stretched. You feel exactly like you’re full of milk, basically. So, while doing comedy, I bent my knees slightly to put the relevant pieces of body out of frame, popped the clip on my camisole and attached the tool known as the Hakaa to my right bosom.

Illustration to follow for those of you who like recent-past-me aren’t familiar with the equipment.

And technique:

Do I overshare? Very well then, I overshare. I am large, I contain multitudes (and also like, heaps of milk).

But there I was, slowly** filling a container with self-milk just off screen, while doing live comedy to a thousand people, that would subsequently be released to many more thousands of people (how many people listen to the news quiz?). And I thought, this is extremely weird and humiliating, and this is exactly what living the dream feels like. I am having it all. Huh.

End of Story.

… or is it!?***

* assuming you don’t know what this feels like, it’s as though you have a spiderweb radiating from your nipples out in all directions for about ten centimetres, and someone zaps it with a sort of prickly electric shock, which turns into a mild warm feeling and then you begin to leak.

** but faster than you’d think!

*** it is

Salon Details

Salon this week is open to all levels and will be in East Coast US time.

Topic: Tea With Alice Salon 50

Time: Feb 22, 2022 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Feb 23, 2022 12:00pm Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra

or your local time equivalent.

I’ll send through the link to ALL Patreonites tomorrow.

Salon ‘Rules’

Any topics you want to open up, let me know in the comments here or via DM, or of course you can bring them up during the chat!

If you are shy, feel free to keep your camera off and be the audience in the dark at the back of the room. I won’t call on you.

Tea is compulsory, but we have a very broad definition of what tea is, that includes many things ‘normal’ people would call “not tea”, “absolutely nothing like tea” and “are you just pretending to drink from an invisible cup?”

Xx

A